The Truth About Codependent Relationships

The co-dependent relationships you hear people talk about a lot these days are actually co-conditional love relationships. The belief underlying this is, “I am not whole. I think I need you to be whole. I think you can provide my happiness.”

But then I’m not happy. And I haven’t figured out that I am actually the one to blame, so it MUST be you. So the battle begins for my happiness, which in conditional love is more important than yours.

It starts small. Sarcasm 101.

Escalating all the way through Passive Aggression 401. This escalation typically occurs concurrently as you (the codependent) gets healthier and has glimpses of their own strength and wholeness. Each time you make a gain, it strikes fear in the heart of the unhealed person. At first, sarcasm and passive aggression will work. When the lower forms of emotional bullying stop working, it will come out in full combat force. The equivalent of Global Thermonuclear War in this situation is threatening suicide. If all the ways I’ve tried to control you to meet my conditions of love have stopped working and you continue to seek wholeness/health/conditionless love- then this is the last vestige of emotional bullying.

Love would never do this. This is control.

Our society is geared towards this dynamic in relationships and fully supports it. Fear keeps you in the relationship at this point. You believe that love is keeping you but love would never give ultimatums.

Love would never belittle you to get its way. Love doesn’t seek for itself. Love would never threaten. That is pure, unadulterated fear. Hidden in the guise of love. You’d never find anyone being able to get away with this in a society of healthy individuals who know and give love. Once you have true love, the worldly equivalent of what is accepted as love quickly falls away. As it should.

The Conscious Masses Mindset (read my blog on the Conscious Masses Mindset) keeps us locked in this old paradigm through fear. First through fear that the other person is right about you. That you are not worthy without their “love”, and there is something somehow wrong with you if you don’t see that.

If you don’t see it, they will punish you. They deflect the question of true love by making you doubt yourself.

True Love would never do that.

They slowly, deftly, make you second guess your healthy progress and label it and you as damaged goods. Love would never do that. Fear does that. No one is damaged goods. We are all worthy.

What is the way out of this insidious dynamic?

Belief.

You must believe in yourself. You must believe that true love is real and not just an ideal. Then truly love yourself and be brave enough to live that. Then truly love your oppressor by living YOUR truth. When we live someone else’s truth of who we should be, we never find love. We never find ourself. And I’m not talking about someone loving us. I’m talking about the ability to love another. You cannot love another unless and until you love yourself.

Love is the ideal that you are perfect the way you are. You are not damaged goods and are worthy as all humans are.

Love is the knowledge that all the parts of you that have been driven back by fear are actually your salvation. Your unique qualities are needed in this world. You are here for such a time as this!

You will no longer suppress parts of yourself to please another.

That will not only become unnecessary, but it will become impossible to do. You will no longer write people into your story who will do this for you—belittle you, bully you, diagnose you and oppress you. You will be… free.

Your happiness is never in someone else’s control. Only yours. Believe it. True love doesn’t punish. It doesn’t belittle. It doesn’t tell you what to think and do.

True love casts out all fear.

That’s what I’m talking about here. True love, in this case, is love of self. It will crush fear and the consequences of fear (shame, guilt, and punishment).

Fear has kept you quiet and complicit. You no longer need to stay there.